A CASE of arson is being investigated by police after a fire gutted the stage and damaged the main hall of one of Grahamstown’s biggest state schools at the weekend, a mere three days before pupils were due to return to school for the 2012 academic year.

THE ANC, which threw a massive 100th birthday party yesterday, plans to change the way its leaders are elected to protect the organisation from the influence of money and divisive leadership battles.

THE ANC’s centenary celebration was among the most talked-about topics on social media sites at the weekend:

AFRICAN leaders used the ANC’s gala dinner in Mangaung in the Free State on Saturday night to congratulate the party on reaching its 100-year milestone and to give advice on how to handle some of the country’s problems.

EMBATTLED ANC Youth League president Julius Malema may not have addressed the ANC’s 100-years celebrations but his presence was felt throughout the proceedings.

BROTHERS Barney and Lumon van Eeden lived for each other - and on Saturday they died together doing what they loved most: flying.

The ANC’s centenary celebrations teed-off at the Schoeman Park golf club in Bloemfontein on Friday (06/01/2012) morning.

ABOUT 7000 Eastern Cape ANC leaders, members, businessmen, clergy and traditional leaders will head to Mangaung in the Free State tomorrow for the party’s extravagant 100-year birthday bash.

AFTER a consistent decline in the Port Elizabeth education district’s matric pass rate over the past three years, the city’s matriculants managed a marginal increase in last year’s exams.

East Cape matric results from The Heralds Circulation area. Additional results which did not appear in the print supplement are added beneath the thumbnail pictures.

Police overseeing the ANC centenary celebrations in Bloemfontein at the weekend need to separate their political affiliations from their sworn duty as officers, acting national police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi said on Thursday (05/01/2012).

PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma hailed the improved matric pass rate yesterday as a “step in the right direction”. Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga announced the results in Pretoria last night.

ACCREDITATION for the ANC’s centenary festivities started off smoothly yesterday morning.

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress kicked its Youth League leader, Julius Malema, out of the party for five years on Thursday after finding him guilty of sowing division.

Married Minister of Sport Fikile Mbalula - who last night celebrated his 40th birthday with a lavish party in Pretoria - is embroiled in a nasty spat with a former lover.

ALL eyes will be on Nelson Mandela Bay’s new acting municipal manager, Themba Hani, who, over the next three months, is expected to rid the city’s administration of undue political influence - something his predecessor, Elias Ntoba, failed to do.

HERALD reporter Brian Hayward explains in a nutshell the most controversial issues exposed in the 175-page forensic report.

TWO projects singled out by Local Government MEC Mlibo Qoboshiyane when he finally made public the Kabuso report yesterday are laid bare in secret letters to political bigwigs and confidential special investigations attached in the report’s annexures.

AFTER a turbulent fortnight in Nelson Mandela Bay politics, mayor Zanoxolo Wayile and his boss, Local Goverment MEC Mlibo Qoboshiyane, came out guns blazing yesterday, vowing to clean up the rot which has pushed the city’s administration to the brink of collapse.

ANOTHER knife attack has occurred at Arlington Waste Disposal Site. The attack, which took place on Saturday afternoon, comes amid calls by the DA for an investigation into the chaotic state of the site and questionable swopping of contractors.

IT’S one of the iconic wild animals of the metro’s open spaces, but it’s not often seen - certainly not clambering onto the rocks right under your feet. But that was the experience of fishing buddies Gavin Curtis and Stuart Duckenfield who were trying their luck with light tackle and pilchards at Schoenies yesterday (August 10 2011).

SO HOW to communicate the complexity and magnitude of climate change to youngsters from a little school in Zwide? The kids, in grades six and seven at Mzimhlophe Primary School, were given the answer to this question during their visit to the SA Marine Rehabilitation and Education Centre (Samrec) yesterday (August 03 2011).

THE Eastern Cape government has set aside R1.5-million to kick-start an expanded honeybush tea industry that could be ramped up to produce a turnover of R100-million a year and hundreds of new jobs. The good news follows on the results that have emerged from a study of the honeybush industry, commissioned by the Coega Development Corporation (CDC) on behalf of the provincial economic development and environmental affairs department.

NINETEEN stock-theft guards stationed on the top of the Drakensberg have been plucked to safety as heavy snow presses in on their lonely outposts. The guards are housed alone or in pairs in 10 shipping containers, at key points along the Lesotho border with the north-eastern Eastern Cape, in the Rhodes area.

ALGOA Bay is now “the best monitored bay in Africa” with millions of rands worth of equipment installed below the surface measuring a wide range of environmental conditions. That was the proud revelation yesterday (July 28 2011) from SA Environmental Observation Network (Saeon) co-ordinator Shaun Deyzel, who was speaking at a marine science symposium hosted by SA National Parks, at the Addo Elephant National Parks.

PORT Elizabeth based tourism group Mantis Collection has announced a bold expansion into West Africa with a landmark, multi-million US dollar deal signed in PE yesterday (July 25 2011) to roll out a sumptuous suite of boutique hotels in Nigeria. Mantis founder Adrian Gardiner signed the deal at Shamwari Townhouse in Summerstrand with highly respected Nigerian businessman Nze Chidi Duru, who is the chairman of Abuja-based Grand Towers Plc. The Nigerian company has interests in the pension, banking, retail, communications, IT and hospitality sectors.

BILLABONG Pro J-Bay is setting a benchmark for international surfing contests with a comprehensive programme to protect the local environment and combat global climate change.

A SMALL Karoo farmers’ association is so concerned about fracking, and damning new evidence out of the US, it is funding the R10000 bill demanded for a four-day oil and gas conference in Johannesburg, to allow one of its members to attend.

WITH the small waves prevailing yesterday (Sunday July 17 2011) for the Billabong Pro J-Bay, all surfing mojos are focused on the second week of the contest and the swell that, it is hoped, will still set things on fire. The man with un-paralleled expertise in this department is contest director Eric Stedman, 54, who has been scanning synoptic charts, fiddling with barometers and assessing wind direction since he was a grommit back in East London in the 1960s. It also helps that he began surfing Jeffreys Bay 43 years ago.

ALGOA Bay’s first boat-based boat-based whale-watching operation in a decade has been officially launched - and already some exciting sightings are being reported. Lloyd Edwards of Raggy Charters, the company awarded the boat-based whale watching (BBWW) license for Algoa Bay, said yesterday (July 14 2011) he spotted the cow and calf pair of southern right whales off Algorax earlier this week.

HOW many cities in the world can say they get their water from a World Heritage Site? Very few, I bet. Yet, that’s the case with Port Elizabeth and the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality and in fact the Gamtoos River Valley vege farmers.

THE latest edition of one of the great global surfing contests, built around an iconic right-hand point break, was launched in Jeffreys Bay last night (Wednesday July 14 2011).

ATTENTION in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sex case shifted to the accuser, a New York hotel maid who now faces mounting credibility problems, as the ex-IMF chief enjoyed freedom from strict bail conditions.

THE biggest baddest pair from Bayworld’s de-commissioned aquarium, two bulky raggedtooth sharks, were released yesterday (July 26 2011) back into the sea. It was a sad day for the oceanarium, where they have lived for nearly two decades, inspiring awe in hundreds of thousands of visitors - but it is good news for the species, as the pair are now part of a research project aimed at securing our waters as one of the few safe havens in the world for raggies.

IT may not be good television, but the controversial international news programme, Naked News, does not fall foul of the Broadcasting Code of Conduct, a full tribunal of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa ruled yesterday.

A FRANTIC six-hour search for a disabled Nelson Mandela Bay businessman, who was abducted by robbers from his Beverley Grove townhouse early yesterday morning, ended after a pedestrian discovered the bound, beaten and traumatised victim near Uitenhage.

A UNIQUE study into the abundance, distribution and movement of great white sharks in Algoa Bay, sponsored by the metro, has been launched. There has never been a fatal shark attack in Algoa Bay, but the metro has committed the R800000 grant as a pro-active step, taken in line with their marketing of Port Elizabeth as “the watersports’ capital of Africa”, researcher Dr Matt Dicken explained yesterday (June 21 2011).

SEVEN years after a rusty jungle gym fell on her, leaving her permanently disabled and badly scarred, an Algoa Park teen is fighting a R3.5-million legal battle for damages and justice. Lucindy Hendricks, now 19, went from being a happy, lively 12-year-old to a partially paralysed girl who now battles to get up the 50 steps to her mother’s flat.

BUSHY Park Dairy Farm, a flagship “proudly Port Elizabeth” business and a much-loved feature of the metro for the past 20 years, is facing closure. The shock news was confirmed yesterday (June 21 2011) by managing trustee Puffer Hartzenberg, who was responding to unconfirmed reports about the matter.

A NEW book aimed at celebrating our natural heritage and guiding sound future conservation policy has been published in Port Elizabeth. Historical Incidence of the Larger Land Mammals in the Broader Western and Northern Cape (including the Eastern Cape as far east as Sundays River) is a complete re-furbishment - with summaries, maps, illustrations and two new chapters - of the original work of the same name by legendary naturalist Dr Jack Skead, who died in 2006.

TWO Karoo farmers have flown out of PE on a ground-breaking mission to the US, to get the low-down on fracking, in the country where it all began.

IF WE CAN link Refit with electrical motorcars - then we could really be onto something. Speaking to The Herald yesterday (June 14 2011), department of environmental affairs deputy-director general for climate change, Peter Lukey, said the scheduled launch this month of South Africa’s Renewable Energy Feed-In Tariff (Refit), will likely lead to significant positive change.

AN UNUSUAL re-forestation and carbon sequestration project is underway in the heart of the old Transkei, where savage erosion is a common feature. The R7600000 project is being run as a partnership between the Congress of Traditional Leaders’ of South Africa (Contralesa), the national department of environmental affairs and a Johannesburg-based company called Carbon Worx.

EASTERN Cape economic environment MEC Mcebisi Jonas yesterday announced significant new green economy investment to boost green economy skills in the province.

FOR world-renowned reptile and amphibian expert Dr Bill Branch, who retired this week from Bayworld after 32 years employment there - it all began in 1969, on the shores of a lake in East Africa.

GOVERNMENT will this month launch the long-awaited Refit programme that will make funding available to pay private energy entrepreneurs who will generate their own green electricity and sell it to the grid.

THE Eastern Cape government has declared its intention to lead from the front in the war against climate change, with a landmark multi-benefit project agreement signed at the Eastern Cape Climate Change Conference in East London yesterday (June 08 2011).

EVERYONE change - a milestone Eastern Cape climate change conference, featuring senior political leaders and climate change experts, is set to start in East London today (Wednesday May 8). The Eastern Cape Climate Change Conference will focus on the strategy document that has been prepared by local role-players, and will look towards the UN’s Cop17 summit, the international climate change indaba in Durban in December

BLACK-out fears notwithstanding, there is more than enough electricity for the megawatt-hungry Coega manganese smelter, according to the Coega Development Corporation (CDC). CDC communications’ chief Senzeni Ndebele was responding this week to concerns expressed about the power demands of the smelter and how this will affect Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality residents and existing businesses.

TWO Motherwell “eco-schools” were the recipients this week of tens of thousands of rands worth of equipment and furniture to help them learn better. The 26 maths and reading software packages, 100 desks and 200 chairs were donated by ABB after the power and automation giant participated last year in a Wessa eco-schools’ workshop in PE.

A STRANGE-looking plume of discoloured water has been appearing sporadically in the bay between Shark Rock Pier and Humewood Beach, resulting in a number of calls from concerned residents, Following an initial report on May 20 by Humewood resident Elize Pretorius, and then disappearing for several days, it reappeared again this week, prompting further calls.

CONCERNS have been raised that the oil and gas exploration rig in Port of Ngqura could be leaking oil into the bay. Both the Norwegian company that owns the ultra-deepwater drilling rig and the harbour authorities have rejected as unfounded the concerns raised by environmental group Ocean Messengers.

Was it a bird? Was it a plane? Was it a comet hurtling to Earth in delayed fulfillment of Harold Campling’s doomsday prophesy? Well, no. In fact, it was the International Space Station (ISS) and space shuttle Endeavour, catching the last rays of the setting sun.

THE Port of Ngqura has become an extraordinary magnet for marine life, and could point the way to an important new role for harbours, according to Bayworld marine biologist and shark specialist Dr Matt Dicken.

THERE are moths and there are moths - and then there is the pine tree emperor, one of the giants of the insect world. Gorgeous yellow in colour and “easily the size of a man’s hand”, one of these moths swooped into a Seaview home the other night.

A SWATHE of critically endangered forest and new generation legislation formulated to combat climate change are at the centre of a confrontation in Deer Park. The forestry department has slammed as “reckless and malicious” the clearing of the area, which is over 100m long by on average 4m wide.

HE WAS a prickly customer - but in the end he came quietly. It was Patrick Mange, the cleaner and gardener at beachfront flatblock Bandle, next to the Beach Hotel, who found him.

THE Eastern Cape has fared well at the Indaba tourism conference and expo in Durban, taking gold in two different categories in the main Welcome awards and only just falling short in the Eteya emerging tourism operators’ awards. The Welcome Awards winners are both from PE and are both family-owned businesses: the Plantation, the wedding, functions’ and accommodation venue on the Sardinia Bay road, and Economic Cars and Bakkies, the 20-year-old Walmer-based car rental firm.

A CLARION call for “personal and ecological leadership” was issued at a biodiversity celebration function at Kirstenbosch on Thursday night.

NELSON Mandela Bay will soon have its own Kirstenbosch, creating the possibility for a major upswing in environmental protection, tourism and job creation.

NMMU has been catapulted into the forefront of nanoscience research with the arrival of a state-of-the-art custom-built microscope from Japan. The high resolution transmission electron microscope (HRTEM) is the first of its kind that has been sold commercially outside of Japan and the last of a suite of four electron microscopes, costing a total R90-million, that have arrived in the past week from Tokyo manufacturer JEOL and a second manufacturer in The Netherlands.

FOREIGN tourists yesterday compared guards at the Port Elizabeth Harbour to the dreaded Stazi security police of East Germany, following an incident in which their driver was manhandled, forcibly detained and then bundled off to Humewood Police Station. The incident happened yesterday morning as the tourists, a group of five Russians and a Belgian, were about to enter the harbour at its southern entrance, headed for a day diving excursion in Algoa Bay with local dive company Expert-Tours.

I WAS chatting to permaculture activist and leading member of Transition Network PE Naomi Suzane the other day, and she came with a great idea of how to secure, rejuvenate and celebrate the Baakens Valley. We kicked her idea around, and this is how it turned out.

SIMON Swart started drugging in his early teens and he had been through 15 rehabilitation centres before he died, alone in his room in a backpacker lodge in Central, a fortnight ago. But there was much more to this young man.

THE concern group challenging the Thyspunt nuclear reactor has called on government to place a moratorium on all nuclear development in South Africa until the full extent of the Fukushima disaster is known. The call by the Thyspunt Alliance - a broad coalition of residential, cultural, environmental, tourism, fisheries, business and surfing interests in the Oyster Bay, St Francis, Humansdorp and Jeffrey’s Bay area - co-incides with the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl, the historic nuclear melt-down in Ukraine.

PORT Elizabeth has been named as a host city for a world show-jumping championship qualifier event, sparking great excitement in the show-jumping fraternity, and the promise of an energising mid-Winter injection of tourist revenue. The event will be attracting the country’s top jumpers, so it is being celebrated in horsey circles - but it is much more than that, event co-ordinator Tanya Radke said yesterday.

HOW do you transport eight seals to Pretoria? That’s the preoccupation right now of Bayworld’s oceanarium team, as the relocation of their animals moves ahead.

NELSON Mandela Bay Municipality has issued four fines to marine tourism operator Lloyd Edwards related to the controversial chumming incident off Humewood Beach last month. The issuing of the fines at the Port Elizabeth beach office on Friday co-incides with the issuing this week of the long-awaited boat-based whale watching (BBWW) license for Algoa Bay - to Edwards.

TWO rare, pint-size wild cats are due to be begin a long journey this weekend from the Eastern Cape to Denmark, to join a captive breeding programme to add vital resilience to their gene pool. Black-footed cats are the second smallest wild cat in the world behind the rusty spotted cat of India and Sri Lanka.Counts are difficult because of its nocturnal, highly secretive behaviour, but it is estimated that there are only 10000 of them left in the wild.

AN ESTIMATED 2000 people gathered at NMMU on Monday night to listen to a seminal address by celebrated Nature documentary film-maker Sir David Attenborough, 84. The audience packed the university’s main auditorium to watch him live on stage, as well as into two other satellite auditoriums, also at the Port Elizabeth stadium, and a hall at the George campus, where they watched his screened address.

AN OLD university chum was one of the reasons famous natural history documentary maker, celebrity broadcaster and “hero of our time” Sir David Attenborough was so pleased to get an invitation to come to Port Elizabeth. Speaking yesterday to The Herald at the beachfront hotel where he is staying at the invitation of NMMU before the honorary doctorate due to be bestowed on him today, Sir David explained that one of his good friends when he was studying at Cambridge in the 1940s was Patrick Niven.

IN A milestone event yesterday, the horns of the two rhino at Kragga Kamma Game Park were surgically removed, to make them safe from the threat of poachers. The outrage of rhino poaching was brought home as top wildlife vet Dr William Fowlds knelt by the anaesthetised mother rhino and used a chainsaw to remove her enormous horn, while her eight- week-old calf trotted around her, whimpering piteously.

WE HAVE reached a development T-junction. We can either accept, without thinking, the proposed R80-billion oil refinery, Project Mthombo, without an environmental impact assessment having been done - never mind Durban South and the pollution there, never mind scrutinising that extraordinary 18500 permanent jobs’ promise by our premier.

MINERAL Resources’ Minister Susan Shabangu has told Pondoland opponents of a titanium dune mining project that she needs another month to consider their appeal against the Xolobeni coastal dune mining project. Shabangu had been scheduled to announce this week her decision on the appeal by the Amadiba Crisis Committee, which is based on the alleged failure of the applicant mining company to properly consult on the project with either residents of the area or the king and queen of Pondoland.

BAYWORLD’S oceanarium is set to close at the end of this month to prepare for the de-commissioning of the 43-year-old dolphin pool and the transfer of 24 penguins and nine seals to Pretoria Zoo. It’s all part of “operation stop the bleed” in which Port Elizabeth’s much loved museum and oceanarium complex has had to make some tough decisions in order to deliver, hopefully, long-term bounty.

ANGRY residents of the Middleburg area have called for Shell to “get out the Karoo” after the company failed to guarantee the security of their water if fracking goes ahead. Addressing Shell representatives at a hall in Middelburg’s Grootfontein Agricultural College in a hall packed with farmers in T-shirts saying “Don’t Frack with our Karoo,” members of the audience asked repeatedly if the multi-national could “guarantee no risk to our water”.

CHRIS Hani District Municipality is set to do what Treasure the Karoo Action Group is hoping the national government will still decide is necessary. The step? To appoint a team of experts to investigate fracking, the controversial drilling method Shell wants to use to explore for and extract gas from shale beds deep beneath the Karoo

THE department of water affairs says it will be investigating the bridge-broadening project at Sunday’s River because the national roads agency should not be working on the bank or extracting water from the river without a permit. Mcamile Dweni, a scientist in the department of water affairs’ Port Elizabeth office, was responding yesterday to questions about the project and reports that a work team contracted by the agency is piling sand on the bank next to the existing bridge, and water is being extracted from a spot up-river.

A HUMBLE little Port Elizabeth school claimed a momentous first yesterday with the installation of a wind turbine and a linked borehole on their grounds. The 12m turbine has been established at Settlers’ Park Primary School in Walmer, and the power it generates drives a pump that draws water from an adjacent borehole.

THE Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality (NMBM) has called on the Green Scorpions to investigate a Parson’s Vlei stone quarry project which, they say, is flouting several key metro conservation and development plans. The controversy over the project has erupted, ironically, a few days after the metro’s celebration of its bio-regional plan. The milestone plan seeks to chart a path for sustainable development by overlaying conservation and development needs.

THIRTY young people from the Eastern Cape have been given the chance of a lifetime to enter the hospitality trade, in a new partnership programme funded by the government. The programme was officially launched this week in Bathurst and Grahamstown, where a section 21 company, Hospitality Youth Initiative (HYI). has been based for eight years.

KAROO anti-frackers are calling for the authorities to take note of the latest findings in America that fracking could be contaminating drinking water supplies with radio activity. The findings stem from an investigation by the New York Times and were reported in that newspaper on Friday. The findings include that waste water produced by fracking wells often absorbs radio activity from naturally occurring minerals underground like uranium.

NMMU and the national environment department signed an agreement yesterday which gives the Eastern Cape a unique opportunity to contribute to government’s coastal and marine policy. The department has traditionally enjoyed a strong relationship with UCT because of the focus on fisheries on the west coast.

HAS anyone ever wondered how the importers of our manganese ore deal with the air pollution that Transnet and the mining companies seem so completely unable to deal with here in Port Elizabeth? Well, in South Korea, at Hyundai Steel in Incheon, imported manganese and iron ore goes straight from the ship into giant domes.

HUNDREDS of mysterious Smith’s swimming crabs , have beached themselves at Cape Recife, apparently trying to escape from severe “upwelling” in the bay. Algoa Bay is host each summer to classic examples of upwelling, which follows on strong and prolonged onshore winds that fold the waves back upon themselves and draw up icy water from the lower depths, wildlife and environment society conservation officer Morgan Griffiths explained.Reports indicate the crabs have been washing up for over a week on Recife’s beacon beach, which runs along the northern side of the cape. But by Monday, the piles of pink and orange carcasses had grown still further.

IT COULD take some farmers in Nieu Bethesda a decade to get back to where they were before the flood that hit them Saturday. That’s the word from the mountainous catchment area north of Graaff-Reinet, where well over 100mm of rain fell in 24 hours, flooding the Gats River and all its tributaries, flattening stock fences, stripping roads to bedrock and bursting farm dams.

BRING back herdsmen en force to save the leopard, minimise livestock losses - and create jobs. That was the win-win-win solution presented yesterday by respected researcher Dr Quinton Martins who was speaking at a leopard management workshop at East Cape Training Centre in PE, hosted by the Eastern Cape department of economic development and environmental affairs (Dedea).

IF fracking applicants gets the go-ahead in the Karoo, South Africa’s arid heartland faces the prospect of hundreds of thousands of wells using trillions of litres of water, a lawyer representing the anti-fracking lobby said yesterday. Graaff-Reinet attorney Derek Light, who is representing some 250 landowners, individuals and interest groups said information from the US environmental protection agency on the fracking industry there indicates up to 80000 wells could be sunk in a 30000ha zone.

ABOUT a hundred eager young swimmers from Port Elizabeth’s northern and township areas will miss out on what is considered to be the highlight event of their sporting year.

Pupils and parents flocked to Newspaper House to snap up The Herald Matric Results supplement. Now we make available to you pdfs of the supplement pages.